Past Mortem (18 page)

And with that Dr Clarke bustled Newson and Natasha out of her office and rushed off to deal with a life that had clearly spun somewhat out of control.

As Natasha and Newson drove back to New Scotland Yard they considered the significance of the new information.

‘It certainly justifies your going to Scotland,’ Natasha said. ‘I mean, you didn’t crack a German spy ring, but not bad all the same.’

‘As I said, a bit of luck, being there when that kid got bullied.’

‘Of course, the Bishop murder weapon being a compass doesn’t preclude the suspect’s being an angry business associate,’ Natasha said, but without much conviction. She knew that in the Tarmac community school compasses were unlikely to be a weapon of choice.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Newson replied, ‘but I’m absolutely certain that the compass was central to the motivation for the murder. It seems reasonable to at least experiment with the assumption that at some point in his life Adam Bishop himself used a compass in anger and that eventually it came back to haunt him.’

‘Well, the last time I laid eyes on one myself I was at school.’

‘Exactly. Me too. Of course he
might
have used one since. He was a builder. Builders talk to architects. Architects do geometry.’

‘Yes, I suppose we’d better take a look at that.’

‘Otherwise, it’s a school thing. He stabbed some kid and now the kid has stabbed back.’

‘But Adam Bishop was fifty-five! Something like that would’ve happened over forty years ago.

‘The mills of God.’

‘What?’

‘The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small.’

‘Shit, Ed, you think someone waited forty years before taking revenge for being bullied?’

‘Perhaps. I know someone who waited twenty.’

‘Who?’

‘A girl I knew at school — ’

‘Christine? Your old pash?’

‘No, the other one. Helen.’

‘Ah, the one you titted off because the miners were losing their strike.’

‘Yes, that’s right, if you must put it like that. I never knew it, but Christine bullied Helen and got some of her gang to stuff a tampon in her mouth.’

‘Nice.’

‘And now that Christine has decided to arrange a class reunion over Friends Reunited Helen has decided to tell the class all about it.’

‘Wow! Good goss! How did that go down?’

‘The reunion hasn’t been cancelled, so I suppose most people don’t see it as their problem.’

‘D’you think this Helen girl will go?’

‘No, I very much doubt it. She certainly didn’t say she was going.’

‘Oh yes, of course! You met her, didn’t you? So how did
that
go? Did you get any further then upstairs inside this time?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He said it, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. The tiny hesitation was enough to give away the truth.

‘You did! You did! You scored, didn’t you?’ Natasha exclaimed. ‘You pulled an old girlfriend over the internet!’

‘Look, we had dinner. Now, can we please move on — ’

‘Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t shag her! Come on, look me in the eye and say you just had dinner.’

‘Natasha, we have a very — ’

‘You did! I know you did! That’s amazing.
Fast stuff
, Ed! Good
work
, fellah! Come on, tell me everything. How was it? Was it great, or was it completely complex and weird?’

Newson gave in. ‘It was completely complex and weird.’

‘I warned you. I told you only sad people get into this sort of situation.’

‘I got into that sort of situation, Natasha.’

‘All right, maybe not sad…Just a bit…well, you’ve got to admit it, it
is
a strange way to get laid. Anyway, never mind that. I want to know
how
weird and
how
complex.’

‘Very, but it’s over and done with now. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘You
hope
it’s over and done with, but I’ll bet it isn’t.’

‘It is.’

‘She may be a bunny-boiler. Unbalanced and vengeful.’ Natasha put on an American accent. ‘What? So you think you can screw me then just
walk away!

Think again, Detective Inspector Newson! Eeee, eeee, eeeeh!’ Now she was doing the shower scene from
Psycho
.

‘This isn’t a movie and it’s definitely over.’

‘So come on, you have to tell me. What happened?’ But Newson would not be drawn. ‘All I can say is that when you crash your plane on to the deck of someone else’s life after an absence of twenty years, it’s hardly surprising that you encounter a bit of damage. Helen had plenty, her life is complex and difficult, and I think that perhaps momentarily she hoped my appearance might provide some solutions for her.’

‘And you just wanted a shag.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Bummer.’

‘The very word I was thinking of myself.’

The conversation lapsed for a moment. Newson felt uncomfortable. He did not really like Natasha’s knowing that he had slept with Helen. Certainly he was happy for her to understand that he was not entirely sexless, but he also suffered from irrational feelings of infidelity. In sleeping with Helen he had been unfaithfull to his fantasy relationship with Natasha, and although she would never know how much he loved her he was still prone to a kind of perverse private guilt.

‘Everything good with you?’ he asked, breaking the silence. ‘Lance well?’

‘All right. He’s not happy with me working so hard.’

‘As far as I can see he’s not happy with anything you do at all.’

‘He’s dealing with a lot of issues. He’s a complex bloke.’

‘He’s a very lucky one, that’s all I can say. He should be on his knees with gratitude that you even give him the time of day.’

‘Oh, you don’t know me. I can be a right bitch.’

‘Oh, I know
that
.’

Natasha smiled. Newson wanted to kiss her so much it hurt.

‘I…I missed you while I was away,’ he said. ‘I mean.., it was nice when you called.’

‘I thought you wanted to get away from everything.’

‘Yes, work, of course, but not from…Well, it was just nice to hear from you, that’s all.’

Natasha turned to him and smiled, but then looked away. There was further silence. Every fibre of Newson’s being yearned to declare his love. To throw caution to the wind, fall on to his knees next to the gear stick of Natasha’s Renault Clio and plead with her to forsake Lance for him. But he didn’t.

‘Yeah, well. Anyway,’ Natasha said.

Newson opened his briefcase and fossicked pointlessly with papers, trying to refocus his mind on what they should have been discussing.

‘Right,’ he said firmly, ‘we need to discuss what to do about the Bishop case. It seems clear to me that we have to take a look at who he went to school with.’

‘Shit, that’s a hell of a job. Forty years is a long time. People could be absolutely anywhere.’

‘Fifty years. If he’s fifty-five now he first went to school in about 1954 or five.’

‘I don’t think they have compasses in nursery school.’

‘That’s true. I reckon we should start by taking a look at who was at school with him in 1958 and ‘59.’

‘Why particularly then? They left school at fifteen in those days, so he’d have been there till at least 1964.’

‘Just a hunch. Cliff Richard released ‘Move It’ in 1958.’

‘Any good?’

‘Fantastic. It’s generally considered to be the first genuine all-British rock ‘n’ roll record. Cliff was cool in those days.’

‘Was he really around in
1958?
’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘And the killer was playing ‘Move It’ while he punctured Adam Bishop with a school compass three hundred and forty-seven times.’

‘Yes, that and the Everly Brothers, the Platters, all terrific stuff, all from the last two years of the fifties. Elvis was in the army, you see. The field was wide open.’

‘I suppose it does seem kind of likely that the killer chose that music for a purpose,’ mused Natasha.

‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Besides that, we need to keep going with cross-referencing our five murders. Look at the backgrounds on Spencer, Bradshaw and Tatum. It’d be interesting to see if they were all viewed with the same degree of animosity in their circles as were Adam Bishop and Farrah Porter.’

Natasha dropped Newson off at New Scotland Yard. She was to return to Kensington to supervise further forensic work on Farrah Porter’s flat. The police had been forced to vacate the apartment while MI6 went through it, and only now was the investigation back in police hands.

Newson stood on the pavement, watching as he had done so often as Natasha disappeared into the traffic.

Even her little Clio seemed cool and feisty to him. A spunky, independent little car for a spunky, independent little lady. Red, of course. Red meant don’t mess with me. Newson despaired. He was even in love with her fucking car.

With head bowed, he made his way into the office, thinking about the forthcoming class reunion. Perhaps he might find a cure for love there, or at least some distraction from it.

EIGHTEEN

T
he week passed slowly, with the frustrating business of going through the motions of an investigation. Newson was convinced that in the Bishop and Porter cases he was looking for the same killer, and that the motivation for murder was an as yet unidentified element that they had in common — an element that they also shared with the three previous murder victims. However, he had no proof to support this assumption and so was clearly required to pursue his investigations with an open mind.

Farrah Porter had many political associates and rivals, of course, all of whom had to be interviewed, and her recent contacts and activities required investigation. Adam Bishop’s numerous enemies within the building trade and the wider Willesden community all had to be laboriously traced and eliminated. Computers were impounded, bank accounts searched, cupboards opened and skeletons rattled. All was to no avail, as indeed Inspector Newson had privately predicted.

And still the only factor with which Newson was able to link the two victims, one a violent builder, the other a celebrated junior politician, was the fact that they both appeared to have been loathed by those who knew them. In this aspect, at least, Natasha had been able to draw some parallels with the earlier three victims Newson had chosen to lump into his investigation.

‘Angie Tatum wasn’t popular,’ said Natasha, ‘but she wasn’t hated in the way Bishop and to a lesser extent Porter were hated — or at least not recently.’

Natasha and Newson were holding an unofficial end-of-week briefing in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Piccadilly Circus. ‘Most of the people who knew her just thought she was a bit sad.’

‘Hanging on to a glory that was long gone?’

‘Exactly, and, let’s face it, it was a pretty tawdry glory in the first place, wasn’t it? I mean, getting your tits out, what sort of job is that?’

‘Quite.’

‘I did speak to a couple of girls who knew her when she was queen of page three, and they said that in those days she was pretty nasty, cocky and a bit spiteful, but even they weren’t glad she was dead.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Neil Bradshaw was different again. At first you wouldn’t say that he was particularly disliked, but, reading between the lines, people were wary of him. They didn’t trust him. It’s all very political.’

‘Political? He worked at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, didn’t he?’

‘Ah, but it turns out that the heritage museum world is a very small one. Small, incestuous and as prone to bitching, jealousy and backbiting as any other walk of life. Very intense lot, curators.’

‘Who’d have thought it?’

‘It’s the world, isn’t it? Everything’s the same. Same crap, different toilet.’

‘Nicely put.’

‘Bradshaw was a manipulator and a stirrer,’ continued Natasha. ‘He got on to all the committees and spoke at all the conferences, constantly building little power bases and forging and reforging alliances. Weird, eh? He was the Stalin of local tourism. It’s all about funding, of course — who gets it and how much, and Bradshaw was master of bullying committees into putting cash into his area. It made him enemies.’

‘All the same, I can’t see anybody torturing a man and starving him to death because he managed to win a local council tourism grant.’

‘People have killed for less. A lot less.’

‘True. D’you think there’s any actual food in these donuts, or is it all E numbers?’ enquired Newson.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why d’you think they taste so nice?’

‘But the gap between ‘This is delicious,’ and, ‘Oh God, I wish I hadn’t done that,’ is so short.’

‘All the more reason to enjoy it while it lasts,’ Natasha replied, selecting her second, a pink one with green sprinkles. ‘Anyway, apart from the whole tourism political thing, we also picked up one or two accusations of sexual harassment. I got put on to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d had a Saturday job at the bookstall. She claimed that Bradshaw started off giving her gifts and things, but then pretty soon he asked her to email him some holiday snaps of her on the beach. When she refused he turned sinister and set her up, or so she says. She reckons he planted money and a book in her bag and then accused her of stealing them. He also tried to blackmail her into giving him naked photos of herself, even offered to lend her a webcam to do it with. She just left her job and that was the end of it. She never heard from him again. But guess what her parting shot was to me?’

‘ ‘I’m glad he’s dead’?’

‘Her very words. How many times are we going to hear that in this investigation?’

‘So neither Bradshaw nor Tatum’s a particularly. pleasant person. What about Warrant Officer Spencer?’

‘Well, his old outfit is in Afghanistan at the moment, so we haven’t been able to conduct any interviews face to face, but I emailed some questions to the local red-caps and they’ve been quite helpful. Quite glad to be involved in a bit of proper policing, I think, instead of just dealing with drunks. Anyway, yet again we have a picture of a man who was by no means everybody’s cup of tea. He was admired as a tough soldier, but also loathed and feared by the men under him. It seems he believed the only way to toughen a soldier up was to half kill him. You know the sort — if they can survive me, they can survive anything.’

‘Not such a popular attitude in our modern caring and inclusive armed forces.’

‘No, and Spencer nearly lost his stripes on a number of occasions for brutalizing squaddies. The bloke who played the kazoo at his funeral had been forced to lick the entire squad’s boots clean for allegedly turning up on parade with a scuff on his own.’

‘Nasty.’

‘So, anyway, that’s it. Overall, I’d say that your hunch holds up, although much more with Bradshaw and Spencer than with Tatum.’

‘But nonetheless all five of our victims were to a greater or lesser degree shits.’

‘Yes. What we seem to have here is a serial killer with taste.’